1. Network Visualization for
Encyclopedia of Life
HCIL Brownbag
11/27/2011
Jae-wook Ahn, Jenny Preece, and Ben
Shneiderman

2. Goals
• Build a latent social network from implicit
relationships of a Technology Mediated Social
Participation project
• Find out what if the latent network can reflect
real participation network
• Find out what we can learn from the latent
network
• Find out if the network can encourage future
participation

3. Encyclopedia of Life
• Effort to gather and share scientific knowledge
about all living things in a single online resource
• http://eol.org
• Multiple information sources
• Flickr Photo Images
– This group allows anyone to provide images and
videos for the Encyclopedia of Life web site.
– Contributors tag their images for EOL use
– http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life

6. Flickr Dataset
• Crawled : 7/5/2011
• Machine Tags
– “taxonomy:binomial=Dipsacus fullonum”
Owners # Photos #
Photos # with
Machine
Tags
Posted Date
1,415 84,543 78,508 (93%) 9/3/2002~

7. Number of Uploaded Photos per Year

9. Taxonomy of Tags
Tag Count Percentage
binomial
53,544 68
kingdom 6,084 8
family 4,151 5
genus 4,018 5
common 3,256 4
order 2,558 3
class 2,421 3
trinomial 1,562 2
phylum 357 <1

10. Normalizing Tags by Biological
Classification
• ITIS (itis.gov)
• Catalog of Life (www.catalogoflife.org)
• Convert binomials to higher levels
– Homo sapiens
• Homo (species, genus)
• Hominidae (family)
• Mammalia (class)
• Animalia (kingdom)

11. Latent network discovery
1. If two people share interests
– If Flickr photo tags overlap
2. We assume there are implicit connections
– Generate the social network visualization
3. Owner (photo uploader) network
visualization
4. Co-occurrence of tags by spreading activation
– Connect owners with high co-occurrence score
(>= 0.9)

12. Birds, Mammals
Insects
Magnolia
Reptiles, Amphibians
Fish
12
People connecting
birds/mammals to
reptiles/amphibians
People connecting
birds/mammals to
insects

13. Latent network discovery
• Questions:
1. Can the implicit network teach us about
the real network?
2. Will it contribute to the future behavior
changes?

14. Evaluating the network
• Contact the people by email
• Randomly selected Connectors (2) and
Centers (3)
• Questions
1. Have you had any on/off-line relationships with
other EOL Flickr members?
2. If you have, what kind of activities did you have,
especially, regarding what life forms?

15. Connectors
Email correspondences

16. Brian Gratwicke
(Birds/Mammals – Reptiles/Amphibians)
“I am a fish guy by training, I am employed
as an amphibian biologist by training and
used to work for Save the tiger fund. I have
numerous online and offline
communications with various groups and
work at a zoo.”

17. Peter Edin
(Birds/Mammals – Insects)
“I just post to various groups but have no
interaction with users in any way except
the occasional comment(s) on the photos.”

18. Centers
Email correspondences

19. Donald Hobern (Insects)
I’ve had a number of relevant contacts. Here is an attempt to
summarise:
1. I am Director of the Atlas of Living Australia
(ALA, http://www.ala.org.au/) which is a national biodiversity data
management activity that is aligned with and shares data
bidirectionally with GBIF, EOL and other international projects.
2. The ALA has adopted the EOL Flickr group as one of the channels
for photographers to make photos available for use by ALA (since it
benefits many more if we do it this way). We have encouraged many
Australian photographers to contribute and I have personally spent
time helping several to understand how to tag the images, etc.
3. I have had numerous email contacts or face-to-face meetings with
EOL staff and representatives and will in fact be meeting with Cyndy
Parr today at the Smithsonian to discuss future collaborations
between ALA and EOL.

20. Donald Hobern (cont.)
4. I have also spent time commenting on and in some cases suggesting
corrected identifications for images in the EOL Flickr group.
5. I have on two occasions corresponded with EOL Curators when I have
disagreed with some of their comments on my photos. In one case, they
agreed that their proposed reidentification was incorrect. In the other
they had correctly indicated a problem with one photo of a species but
also queried a valid photo.
6. I had one of my photos selected as one of the monthly competition
winners.
• My contacts were generally focussed on photos of species groups for
which I have some expertise (birds, Lepidoptera and some other
insect orders) and for photos from Australia and, to a lesser
degree, Europe, since I am mostly familiar with these faunas.

21. Todd Pierson (Amphibians)
(1) Yes.
(2) Mostly administrators, but also some
amphibian specialists.

22. Arthur Champman (Birds)
• This is a hard question to answer as I have been involved with EOL since
before it began. Indeed one of my emails advocating the EOL was used as
the front page of the EOL site for some time prior to its first release.
• As a photographer, I am very much a generalist. I am a botanist by
training.
• As far as interactions with other EOL people and bird people - I am a
member of TDWG and other organisations , and frequently interact with
Cyndy Parr, David Patterson and other EOL staff members. I also interact
with a number of other EOL contributors from time to time Iin particular -
to use their Flickr ids - treegrow (various), dhobern (birds and moths),
Sciadopitys (bids and others), Tony Rodd (plants), Robert Whyte (spiders),
mirmycian (ants and spiders), servitude (insects and spiders), Barbol (birds
and fish) and many others . I also work a lot with the Atlas of Living
Australia people on all sorts of species as well as on Data Quality issues.
With photographs, perhaps my biggest interactions are with insect people
and entomologists.

23. Arthur Champman (cont.)
• Photography is just part of a bigger environmental arena I work in,
and in many ways it is difficult to separate out the photographic
part from those other activities - such as Data Quality, Crop Wild
Relatives, Environmental Modelling, Citizen Science promotion and
my other consulting activities as they all overlap.
• As a botanist, I also interact with other botanists and mycologists on
identifications, creation of sets for various areas in Australia (see for
example my Werribee Gorge set), groups (other than EOL)
associated with Field Guides in Australia for example - Field Guide
to Insects of Australia, Field Guide to Rainforest Plants in Australia,
Field Guide to Australian Plants as well as non-Flickr Groups on
Fungi, Lichens, etc. I also contribute images for the Reptile Bioblitz
and other groups.

24. Temporal network visualization
• Show the evolution of network visually
• Using colors/shades to represent current/past
activities for nodes/vertices
– Monthly
– Current month (red)
– Past month (low intensity colors)

26. brian.gratwicke – connection with Brds/Mammals

28. Online demo is accessible at
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~jahn/eol

29. Next Steps
• Compare with moderators and admins from
the Flickr EOL group
• Compare with explicit social interactions
gathered from EOL
• Reveal the online temporal visualization to
users
– Find out how it can encourage future
participations